Reason to feel blue, but Democrat Sadler presses on

By Joe Holley

Updated 12:43 am, Thursday, November 1, 2012

Photo: LM Otero, Associated Press

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Republican candidate for U.S. Senate Ted Cruz, right, and Democratic candidate Paul Sadler shake hands before their debate at KERA television studious in Dallas, Friday, Oct. 19, 2012. The two Texas candidates are facing off for the open U.S. Senate seat.

With almost a full year of campaigning dwindling down to the final few days, U.S. Senate candidate Paul Sadler, the Democrat in the race, still hasn't gotten to James Hand, proprietor of the Noonday Feed Store that's been “Feeding God's Creatures since 1998.”

“I've heard of him, but I don't know too much about the guy,” said Hand, 55, a Richmond native who 15 years ago moved to Noonday, 10 miles south of Tyler. “He's in kind of a Republican area.”

Sadler has been hobbled by those twin challenges since he announced his candidacy last December, not only in Noonday but across the Lone Star State. Except in East Texas, the former House member from nearby Henderson is still a relatively unknown Democrat running in the reddest of red states.

Texas hasn't elected a Democrat to statewide office since 1994, and, as Sadler himself is well aware, is not likely to in 2012. The latest figures show his all-but-anointed Republican opponent, Ted Cruz, leading by 15 percentage points, according to a University of Texas at Austin/Texas Tribune poll.

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Fifty-four percent of likely voters said they preferred Cruz, while 39 percent chose Sadler. Sixty-three percent said they were either neutral or had no opinion of Sadler.

The funding disparities are even more daunting. Cruz raised $2 million in August and September and entered October with $2 million in cash. Sadler raised just less than $360,000 between July 12 and Sept. 30 and had a cash balance of $134,000.

The money squeeze meant that the man who once exerted power and influence in the Texas House was unable to put together a broad-based campaign organization and could mount only a token TV ad strategy. He aired his first television ad just this week.

“I wish we had gotten on TV four or five weeks ago, to get name ID up,” he said Wednesday, “but we didn't have the money.”

In Houston on Sunday, Sadler visited four churches in the morning and the West Houston Democratic Party campaign headquarters in the afternoon.

“Hang in there,” Bonnie Boyd told him. Boyd, 60, a retired Harrah's casino manager, said she had been making phone calls and knocking on doors on his behalf.

On Tuesday evening in Tyler, where Republicans outnumber Democrats by a 3-1 ratio, Sadler visited with about 30 members of his party at an art gallery across the street from the Smith County Courthouse.

Standing near a skeletal-looking piece of abstract sculpture — an inadvertent metaphor for the Democratic Party in fervid-red Smith County — he reminded his listeners that there is value in experience. He pointed out that he had served in the Legislature for a dozen years, holding various leadership positions, while his opponent has never held elected office.

“You just don't walk into government and know it,” he said. “It takes a while to understand and know how programs work and don't work, what the problems are and what the good things are, and when you run for the U.S. Senate, you ought to have some basis for that, a basis of knowledge.”

Of the 100 members of the U.S. Senate today, he said, 95 had held prior elective office.

“Of the five that didn't, all but one are tea party,” he said. “That means that if Mr. Cruz is somehow elected to the United States Senate, he would be the most inexperienced person this state has ever sent to Washington, D.C., as a United States senator.”

Sadler excoriated his opponent for vowing to join fellow Republicans in an effort to abolish the departments of Education, Energy and Commerce. Insisting that all three departments are important to Texans, he pointed out that the No. 1 expenditure for the Commerce Department is the National Weather Service.

“This is crazy stuff,” he said. “He (Cruz) gets mad when I call him crazy, but these are crazy ideas. These are ideas borne from a mind that doesn't have the experience to be in the United States Senate, that doesn't have the practical understanding of government to know the difference between what is good for us and what is not.”

Sadler also blasted Cruz's proposal to triple the number of Border Patrol agents and to build a wall along the Mexican border. He noted that the U.S. has 26,000 Border Patrol agents today, plus 1,200 National Guard troops on the border; tripling that number, he said, would approach 100,000.

“You get the idea of the scope of this? There are other ways and better ways to do this,” he said.

Sadler also said the border wall Cruz has proposed would cost $7.3 billion.

“If you ask him would he put $7.3 billion into Social Security, heavens no,” Sadler said.

Hand probably wouldn't be voting for Sadler even he was more familiar with how he and Cruz differ; he's worried about taxes on small business under an Obama administration, he said.

Nevertheless, the Democrat will get some crossover and independent votes, particularly in East Texas, said David Hudson, a Tyler attorney and the last Democratic legislator ever elected in Smith County.

“Even though we're 80 percent Republican, Paul's a good man, and a lot of people will vote for him, because they know he's a good man,” he said.

Hudson, who served in the Texas House from 1981 to 1993, said the day would come when Texas Democrats won't have it so hard.

“I see a slow, incremental change,” he said. “There may be an age component to it.”

Sadler, who says he doesn't expect to run for office again if he's unsuccessful this time, is well aware that victory is unlikely — and will continue to be unlikely, he said Wednesday, until the party gets back to serious grass-roots organizing throughout the state.

He said the party cannot wait for some kind of demographic wave of likely Hispanic voters.